I dug in and began work on my new portfolio for DXARTS.
It was pretty hip at ITP to work with a webcam and to create screen based stuff that riffed off the color data from the webcam. It was a technique that made a particular professor at ITP pretty famous with his works (you can easily figure out who it is if you dig around on google). And honestly, I think most of his works are quite good and deserving of their accolades. The technique is simple. What you do is that you took the image from the webcam an analyzed each pixel for its Red, Green, and Blue values which then you use and modify and whatever to output a new image to the screen.
The bad side effect of him teaching a course which I took (besides him not being able to effectively communicate technical concepts) was that everyone was doing stuff with webcams. If you go to an ITP show today I bet you will still see at least 1 work with a webcam using his Xtra for shockwave. And most likely it's not going to be very interesting or well executed.
You still get exceptions. I'm sick of it and I've let him know that over and over, but what Dan Shiffman did with "Swarm" was both innovative and beautiful and tied in well with the conventional art establishment. Now go produce something new and kick ass Dan! I know you have good ideas and the ability.
Of course, there was my stuff as well, which integrated opengl 3D graphics with the quicktime webcam capture code. You'll notice reading my writings that I hate looking back at my old stuff; I generally think it's not very good. In the case of the "Trails" works, there honestly isn't much going on beyond the good execution of the self taught technology behind the pieces.
However, the concept behind the visualizations of human presence behind network "lag" was indeed intentional and was good enough at least for this kind reviewer and this digital arts festival where Iexhibited earlier this year.
I've since moved on from the cam in favor of other video sources. But at this point video is just another data source I can bring into my work.
Ah, the current focus of my work? You can read about it here, but basically it's about the revisualization and sonification of the myriad of information flows that surround and shape our lives. Hopefully through my works I can make a statement about our new hybrid offline / online culture.
I start at DXARTS very soon, and from what it looks like it'll be the perfect place for me. I'm going to not talk about DXARTS much here for obvious reasons, but this blog is not intended to be a diary anyway.
Posted by edtang at September 16, 2004 10:43 PM